Today Microsoft announced plans to implement CalDav and CardDav support in Windows Phone. That will enable users to still sync with Google services once these shut down their ActiveSync support in Summer. That is highly ironic and almost ridiculous, since Google itself does not support CalDav and CardDav in Android.
It all started with Google’s Winter cleaning: Google announced a couple of weeks ago that their services will soon be no longer offer an ActiveSync interface. That means: all client devices accessing Google’s services via ActiveSync need to switch to some other way of synching. Btw., read carefully: this has nothing to do with Android. Not at all! Also, iPhones don’t have to bother because they can simply switch to CalDav and CardDav which is natively supported in iOS. However, id does affect users of Microsoft’s Windows Phone. They only had ActiveSync as an option.
Now Microsoft announced they are going to implement CardDav and CalDav support in their Windows Phone. So that users can happily sync their Windows Phones with Google services.
And here comes the irony: Google itself does not support CalDav nor CardDav on client side. Google’s Android operating system does not offer it, not at all! Google only supports its own, proprietary sync way used in the Google apps, and has support for ActiveSync, albeit pretty limited support.
So, to summarize: Google forces others to use open standards which they do not support themselves.
While it is good that Microsoft is forced to implement open standards, Google’s acting nevertheless looks ridiculous, that is just sad. I wish Google would have the guts to just add CardDav and CalDav support and have a party with the people fighting for open standards. I mean, how bad would it look like if a Microsoft operating system would support open standards better than a Google operating system?
March 6, 2013 at 14:22
How about open document in google docs? You can save in odf even in ms office (it complains though).
March 6, 2013 at 17:24
Good point – that is something I don’t get, either…
March 6, 2013 at 22:36
It used to be supported, they actually removed that feature, probably because it didn’t fit their vendor lock-in agenda.
March 7, 2013 at 2:15
Wait, what? You can easily export to Open Document formats. I’m really confused by your statement; here, a screenshot I took literally moments ago: http://keithzg.ca/images/utility/google_open_document_export.png
I mean, I’m disturbed by Google’s two-faced nature on open standards myself, but it doesn’t make sense that y’all are claiming it can’t do something I’m seeing it do right now, right in front of me.
March 7, 2013 at 10:17
keithzg, you are right: it can nowadays export documents to odt and spread sheets to ods. The ODF presentation and drawing formats are still not supported, but at least some support is there. Thanks for pointing that out, keithzg.
March 6, 2013 at 14:22
Nice article. I agree, I went looking for CardDAV and CalvDAV 2 years ago, and it still isn’t there. It is a bit hypocritical of Google to state this and then not offer the support themselves.
March 6, 2013 at 17:26
Philip, thanks for the feedback. Good to know that I am not the only one who complains
Btw., the CalDav support can nowadays be added with pretty good 3rd party packages. But yeah, native support is still something entirely different!
March 8, 2013 at 21:39
There are 3rd party CalDAV/CardDAV apps for Android, but to my knowledge none of them is free software or open source.
March 11, 2013 at 15:18
Martin, that is also what I found out so far. But as mentioned in one of the linked articles, the best known CarlDav/CardDav app for Android has good chances to be open sources in the future.
March 6, 2013 at 14:27
Sad indeed. Had to install 3rd party apps (CardDAV-Sync beta and CalDAV-Sync beta) to get this functionality on my android phone.
March 6, 2013 at 17:26
Yeah, me too…
March 6, 2013 at 22:37
Android’s sole reason to exist is to lock you into Google’s proprietary web services, is that still news to anybody?!
March 7, 2013 at 5:25
Is it really a lock-in? I thought you could terminate your account and _export all data_ which is not really a lock-in concept the way I understand the term.
I will agree that the primary reason probably is to get more users of their services, because it is the users that indirectly gives them income. However, without license income Google probably has no large interest in locking users to their services. An unhappy, non-paying user will probably whine so much it is better to not have him/her as a customer.
March 7, 2013 at 3:26
[...] Google & ActiveSync, Microsoft & CalDav: Pure irony [...]
March 7, 2013 at 5:21
Not to defend Google, but I would imagine that Google’s main point is to terminate the support for a proprietary protocol that has to be licensed from Microsoft.
March 7, 2013 at 10:29
Kjetil, of course the motivation behind the step is about license costs and maybe about power. But nevertheless, the irony described above is there, don’t you think?
March 8, 2013 at 16:47
[...] Google & ActiveSync, Microsoft & CalDav: Pure irony (liquidat.wordpress.com) [...]
March 17, 2013 at 11:25
And now they are cancelling CalDAV support on the server side as well http://googleblog.blogspot.de/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html
March 18, 2013 at 11:40
Yeah, I’ve read that, it is really disturbing…
April 25, 2013 at 13:25
Is there an advantage of an abstracted and RESTful API, over a native protocol exposure?
April 26, 2013 at 9:13
What do you mean, exactly? Which protocols do you have in mind here?
May 19, 2013 at 23:09
Google is a corporation like Microsoft and Apple are. Its not OSS company. Its not OSS friendly either. Its even worst!
Microsoft and Apple develop products and sell them for price and make billions. While Google acquire OSS projects, brand them as their proprietary product and give away it for free! The catch is, they add privacy sniffing modules in those products before making them public, so the more you use their products, they more accurately they profile you and sell off your profile to highest bidder. There is no other way that you can make zillions of bucks by doing straight advertising business, given every product is free of cost!
So yeah beware of Google’s habit of harvesting user data and sharing it with THEIR trusted parties (not mine not yours!).
People often confuse Google’s openness with open-source-software community. In my experience the real OSS guys regard Microsoft more than Google, to their contributions in the domain of Computer Science and Software Engineering. Google happens to be a luckiest goon that people trust so much and happily letting them ripping off their privacy!
May 22, 2013 at 12:41
I don’t think that is an appropriate description. Google does push quite some open source projects: chromium, Android, even the Jingle library and definitions for XMPP are from Google. Also, they do have the summer of code which is a great opportunity for many Open Source projects.
I fail to see where Google does acquire Projects and brand them as their own – what are you referring to?
However, there are problems with Google’s perspective towards Open Source projects: they dropped XMPP support in favor of Hangout, which is proprietary. Also, they are not incorporating real caldav support as mentioned above. Thus, right now Google seriously lacks support of open standards and technologies.
Google’s way of treating user data is entirely different, but also remarkable story, of course…
June 6, 2013 at 18:39
Google announced continued support for carddav and caldav – http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/2013/06/making-googles-caldav-and-carddav-apis.html
June 6, 2013 at 23:37
Thanks for the message – I already wrote a blog entry about it, see http://liquidat.wordpress.com/2013/06/06/google-continues-caldav-support-for-everyone-now-also-adds-carddav =)